Vibroscape analysis reveals acoustic niche overlap and plastic alteration of vibratory courtship signals in ground-dwelling wolf spiders

Soundscape ecology has enabled researchers to investigate natural interactions among biotic and abiotic sounds as well as their influence on local animals. To expand the scope of soundscape ecology to encompass substrate-borne vibrations (i.e. vibroscapes), we developed methods for recording and analyzing sounds produced by ground-dwelling arthropods to characterize the vibroscape of a deciduous forest floor using inexpensive contact microphone arrays followed by automated sound filtering and detection in large audio datasets. Through the collected data, we tested the hypothesis that closely related species of Schizocosa wolf spider partition their acoustic niche. In contrast to previous studies on acoustic niche partitioning, two closely related species - S. stridulans and S. uetzi - showed high acoustic niche overlap across space, time, and/or signal structure. Finally, we examined whether substrate-borne noise, including anthropogenic noise (e.g., airplanes) and heterospecific signal..., Field recording:
For field recordings, we chose five study plots (10 m x 10 m) at the field station of the University of Mississippi at Abbeville, Mississippi, USA (34˚43’ N 89˚39’ W). In each study plot, we deployed a TemLog20 temperature logger (Tamtop, Milpitas, California, USA), 25 recording units consisting of a contact microphone (35 mm diameter, Goedrum Co., Chanhua, Taiwan) and a Toobom R01 8GB acoustic recorder (Toobom, China), and four pitfall traps (Carolina biological supply company, Bunington, North Carolina, USA). The temperature loggers recorded the temperature at each recording plot every 15 minutes during the experimental periods. In total, we deployed 125 recording units, 5 temperature loggers, and 20 pitfall traps across our five study plots. We conducted a 24-hour recording every three days from May 15th to July 15th, 2018 resulting in a total of 1950 24-hour recordings across 13 days. The substrate-borne vibrations during 24 hours in study plots were continuously re..., Python packages: Pydub (Robert & Webbie, 2018), kneed (Satopää et al., 2011), Noisereduce (Sainburg et al., 2020), Scipy (Virtanen et al., 2020) and Scikit-learn package (Pedregosa et al., 2011).
R for statistical analysis, # Vibroscape analysis reveals acoustic niche overlap and plastic alteration of vibratory courtship signals in ground-dwelling wolf spiders

## Data description

### audio\_all.zip

Audio files of sounds that were detected from the raw audio datasets

### MS\_bout + noise.csv

Detected sounds bouts with the information of abiotic/biotic noise at the time of sound production

#### Columns

1. glob_cat: global categories of sound bouts
2. date: recording date
3. plot: recording plot
4. rec_ID: recorder id (all = air-borne sounds)
5. file_begin: original recording file that the bout starts
6. file_end: orignial recording file that the bout ends
7. bout_loc_begin: time point of bout beginning within an audio file
8. bout_loc_end: time point of bout ending within an audio file
9. bout_glob_begin: time point of bout beginning in a whole recording duration
10. bout_glob_end: time point of bout ending in an whole recording duration
11. mean_temp: average of temperature (recorded every 1...